F1: 2011 Hungarian Grand Prix: Free Practice

MERCEDES GP PETRONAS drivers Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher completed the first two practice sessions for the Hungarian Grand Prix today at the Hungaroring circuit just outside of Budapest.

Nico and Michael completed 114 laps in total, ending the two sessions in seventh and eighth places respectively.

The focus today was on evaluating the Pirelli soft and super soft tyres around the tight and twisty Hungaroring layout.

Two productive sessions saw the team collect plenty of data with further dry running of the recent new developments.

Drivers

Car No.

Chassis No.

Practice 1

Practice 2

Nico Rosberg

8

MGP W02 / 07

22 laps

1:24.250

P7

36 laps

1:22.121

P7

Michael Schumacher

7

MGP W02 / 09

20 laps

1:24.369

P8

36 laps

1:22.440

P8

Weather

Overcast

Temperatures

Air: 19-23°C

Track: 21-33°C

Nico Rosberg

“This circuit is really challenging, and it’s very satisfying when you get your laps together cleanly around here. We had two decent sessions and the short and the long runs on the super softs were reasonable. However there is still a lot of work to do to improve our package for qualifying and look at how to manage the tyre degradation. It’s interesting to see how the top six positions are changing from race to race, and we’ll keep pushing to get even closer to, and maybe into, that group.”

Michael Schumacher

“Coming to the second race of a back-to-back series means that you are not able to do a great deal to the car between the two weekends so the practice sessions today went pretty much according to our expectations. We do have the developments from the last couple of races to work with but they obviously do not mean we can make up some positions. We will certainly try to make the best of what we have in our hands for qualifying tomorrow and the race on Sunday.”

Ross Brawn

“We had two reasonable sessions today with a lot of mileage achieved on both cars. It’s clear that the tyres are degrading a fair amount with the track in its current state so we have gathered lots of good information on this to work with overnight. Having such a short time between this race and Germany last weekend, there are no further major developments on the car so we are focusing on getting the best from our recent upgrades and improving their performance.”

Norbert Haug

“We did a lot of laps today, and only both Ferraris achieved a higher mileage during both sessions amongst the top eight placed cars. We learnt a great deal as well which we now will try to translate into a more consistent performance during the race stints on Sunday. Our single lap performance looks quite decent, taking into account our current level of performance, and the fact that the layout of this track is certainly one of the most challenging ones for the current concept of our car. Tomorrow it will be about optimising what we have learned today in order to be in our best possible form for the race on Sunday.”

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